Dear Friends,
We all want an easy way out—whether it’s a quick fix for our health, a shortcut to success, or a hack to get through the hard stuff. It’s our human nature. Spoiler alert: the “easy out” doesn’t exist, especially when living a long and healthy life.
In an article in the NY Times, an author wrote that the key to longevity is boring:
“Research has long shown that health and longevity come down to five fundamental lifestyle behaviors: exercising regularly, eating a nutritious diet, eschewing cigarettes, limiting alcohol consumption, and nurturing meaningful relationships.”
His point is that we know what to do to have as long and healthy a life as possible.
And if we do so, as the Stoics pointed out 2000 years ago, life is long enough, plenty, if you live it well. However, that requires managing our behavior. Today’s easy out is believing that you can delegate this to a piece of technology or that another pill or nostrum will do it for you. Even more, there is “one simple trick.”
That’s the big lie.
The keys to a long and healthy life are straightforward. What is most neglected among these keys in the US today are **quality relationships and a sense of community. ** We all know the importance of a good diet, exercise, and rest, and that there is no substitute. Recently it’s also been verified that exercise, particularly strength training, has substantial neurological benefits including maintaining intelligence and forestalling Alzheimer’s or senility.
Like most people, in my fitness journey, I began looking for a newer, better, quicker way. After all, I promote improvement, right? And weightlifting is so old school, isn’t it? There had to be a better, newer, ultimate practice of some sort. The result was a lot of lost practice time and progress and some injuries. What worked was returning to my sometimes-boring 5 basic lifts and doing them consistently.
An example is a millionaire in Southern California getting everything up to blood transfusions from a younger person to extend his longevity. At least, he’s acting on the belief that it will. These extreme measures all share the lack of scientific evidence of efficacy.
If you spend just two hours a day in unproven pursuits intended to extend your lifespan, how much of your life are you giving up for that speculative benefit? Let’s do some simple math. The best recommendations for needed time spent on exercise range from 3 to 7 hours weekly.
To do what the “maximizers” recommend, I would add another hour or two a day. Suppose you spend just one hour daily, just an extra 7 hours a week, pursuing cold plunges, low-angle morning sunlight, box breathing, green powders, etc., ad nauseum. That’s 364 hours a year or three weeks of 16-hour days.
How can you take this seriously when the advocates of a “quantified life” ignore the most blindingly apparent quantifiable element: your present cost?
You would give up three weeks a year, every year, for 70 years on the chance that you might exist a few years longer. Three weeks is an entire extra vacation every year of your life, or a very in-depth, thorough NLP training. That loss starts right now, and it is absolutely sure. Do you really want to give up that much? If you did, could you really stick with it for your entire life? NLP could help you do that, but aren’t there better uses?
If there was any substantial evidence that these extremes produced any real results an argument could be made. For instance, if there was proof that it would give you more additional healthy years than it’s taking away, that would be an argument but there is no such evidence.
Even that wouldn’t change the odds of your being killed by some random event, whether a lightning strike, a mass shooting, war, or a car crash. Ironically, the more you extend your life, the greater your exposure to randomness. That’s real life, and reality doesn’t care about your beliefs.
There’s truth in every fable. Yes, eat well, exercise, and take care of your body—but do it in a way that enhances your life, not in a way that consumes it. This is where the Stoics got it right: **resolve what’s holding you back, focus on what truly matters, and live in the present.**
If you’re looking for the perfect process or shortcut to health, happiness, or success, here’s the truth: there isn’t one. Start with what you have right now as your foundation and build from there.